“There is power in Our, and we,” Vanzell Johnson, an Our Walmart member from Lancaster, Texas, told me last month. He’s frustrated with how the company treats its employees, not to mention the dismal wages. Workers around the country allege that despite the company’s supposed “open door policy”, they risk retaliation for speaking up about their conditions by having their hours cut or getting unfavorable shifts.

Walmart, as historian Bethany Moreton pointed out in her excellent book To Serve God and Walmart, was founded and grew in the heartland US where suspicion of chain stores and outsider money was skilfully turned by favorite son Sam Walton into support for his homegrown mega-chain.

Even today, Walmart’s low prices are used for a particular kind of populist appeal: by lowering the cost of living, the argument goes, Walmart helps people “live better”. In fact, they’ve adopted that as their tagline: “Save Money. Live Better.”

The Walmart workers who are now daring to challenge their bosses, meanwhile, have turned that mantra around: “Stand up. Live better” (pdf). Because they know that no matter how low prices at Walmart go, their low wages ensure that they are not, in fact, able to “live better”.

As internal documents have confirmed, Walmart maintains a cap on the wages an associate can make, limiting raises to 60 cents a year for “flawless” performance. Janet Sparks, a Walmart worker from Baker, Louisiana who’s been with the company since 2005, told me that she had colleagues who hadn’t gotten a raise since 2006 because of the cap.

“Walmart has been shown to come into a community, pay lower wages than the traditional wage standard, and actually depress the wage standard in the area.”

Manuela Rosales makes $10.70 an hour at the Pico Rivera, California Walmart. I heard her break down in tears on a conference call, as she explained that the $750 or so she takes home after taxes every couple of weeks barely lets her care for her two-year-old son.

“They have it set up to take it or leave it and most people will not leave it,” Johnson said. With average unemployment still hovering around 8% (and much high for minorities), workers are forced to take what they can get, even if “what they can get” leaves them working long hours over the holidays. If Walmart were to adopt the higher standard she suggests in her report, Ruetschlin asserts:

“Being the largest employer in the United States … they would have significant impact. Based on prior research, it’s absolutely reasonable to think they would raise standards for everyone.”

The Walmart strikers taking the risk of challenging the company on its most profitable day, then, are truly striking for all of us. And it’s a large risk, because if they’re fired, they go out into a job market where there are few opportunities and many others in the same line also waiting for an opening.

Beyond the wage issue, the strikers are fighting for respect and fair treatment: the ultimatum given the company in order to prevent the Black Friday actions was not a raise, but a call to end the retaliation against workers who speak out. As Moreton has noted, the company managed for many years to have happy employees who felt they were part of the Walmart family; it’s the treatment on the job that drove long-time employees like Sparks to speak out.

“Most working people spend most of their time at work, so when I’m at work, I want to be recognized as being taken care of,” Johnson said. Colby Harris, one of the Walmart strikers, told the Nation’s Josh Eidelson that he’s determined to stay at Walmart and keep fighting:

If you change Walmart, and you change corporate America, it can really better a lot of people’s lives.